Associate Director - Technical Capabilities Lead

Eli Lilly and Company • Us, IN

9d

About The Position

The Associate Director - Technical Capabilities Lead owns the technical direction, service operations, stakeholder alignment, and innovation for AI-driven solutions that detect adverse events (AE) and product complaints (PC). The role combines technical expertise in AI/ML systems—including NLP, LLMs, model evaluation, and MLOps—with the ability to work across complex stakeholder environments and engage regularly with senior leadership.

The role serves as the primary technical authority for the detection solution and oversees the vendor-owned service, capability backlog, feature delivery, automation, and integration with case management and safety systems. It evaluates model performance, reliability, and drift; partners with data science and engineering teams on improvements and validation; and assesses emerging AI capabilities. The role also ensures auditability, traceability, regulatory defensibility, and compliance in a safety-critical environment.

The position acts as a liaison among technical teams, business owners, Pharmacovigilance and Quality functions, IT, Compliance, Regulatory, Legal, and Quality Assurance. It communicates solution performance, risks, roadmap, and value to senior leadership and supports audit readiness and regulatory compliance. Lilly states an anticipated wage range of $129,000–$189,200. Full-time equivalent employees are also eligible for a company bonus, depending in part on company and individual performance, and eligible employees may access a comprehensive benefits program.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree.
• At least 5 years of experience in AI/ML solution delivery, technical program leadership, or product management.
• Strong working knowledge of AI/ML model types, including NLP, transformer-based and classification models, and LLMs, and their practical application in text/data classification and entity-extraction use cases.
• Experience with automation frameworks, workflow orchestration, and MLOps practices, including model versioning, CI/CD, monitoring, and drift detection.
• Familiarity with model performance evaluation, including precision, recall, and false positive/negative rates, in high-stakes or regulated contexts.
• Understanding of data pipelines (ETL/ELT), integration patterns (REST APIs, messaging, and batch interfaces), and enterprise system architecture.
• Demonstrated ability to manage complex, multi-functional stakeholder relationships.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with proven experience presenting to senior leadership or executives.
• Ability to translate technical detail into business impact and risk framing.
• Strong facilitation and negotiation skills to align diverse stakeholder priorities.

Nice To Haves

• Exposure to responsible AI principles, model risk management, or AI governance frameworks.
• Familiarity with pharmacovigilance, adverse event reporting, or product complaint handling processes.
• Understanding of regulatory expectations for safety data systems in the pharmaceutical or life sciences industry.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary technical authority for the AI detection solution, guiding model selection, solution architecture and integration design, and automation strategy.
• Oversee operations of the vendor-owned AE/PC detection solution and ensure service performance meets contracted SLAs and KPIs, including precision, recall, latency, and availability.
• Maintain the capability backlog and partner with the business owner to prioritize feature implementation through PI planning.
• Be accountable for delivery of capability features needed to support global initiatives using the AE/PC detection service.
• Evaluate and oversee the performance, drift, and reliability of AI/ML models that detect adverse events and product complaints across sources such as call transcripts, emails, social media, and structured or unstructured text.
• Partner with data science and engineering teams on model improvements, retraining and fine-tuning, labeled-data and ground-truth curation, and validation processes.
• Assess emerging AI capabilities, including LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, prompt engineering, and NLP techniques, for detection accuracy, scalability, and compliance.
• Ensure solution architecture supports auditability, traceability, and regulatory defensibility, including model versioning, data lineage, and audit logging.
• Identify opportunities to automate manual triage, classification, and escalation workflows, including confidence-threshold routing and risk-based human-in-the-loop review.
• Define technical requirements for automation pipelines, including APIs, data schemas, and message flows, and ensure integration with case management and safety databases.
• Partner with teams that consume AE/PC detection services to implement components needed to build integration pipelines.
• Monitor automation performance metrics, including throughput, straight-through processing rate, and error rates, and drive continuous improvement.
• Manage the contracted team responsible for monitoring the AE/PC detection service.
• Act as the key liaison among technical teams, business owners, Pharmacovigilance/Quality functions, IT, and Compliance.
• Translate complex technical concepts into clear, business-relevant language for non-technical audiences.
• Prepare and deliver senior-leadership presentations on solution performance, risks, roadmap, and value delivered.
• Manage competing priorities and expectations across stakeholder groups with differing technical fluency and objectives.
• Build trust and consensus among stakeholders, including Regulatory, Legal, and Quality Assurance.
• Ensure the AI solution adheres to relevant global regulatory requirements, including FDA and EMA requirements for pharmacovigilance and complaint handling systems.
• Support audit readiness and documentation.
• Collaborate with Quality and Regulatory teams to ensure detection thresholds and escalation logic meet compliance standards.

Benefits

• Company bonus for full-time equivalent employees, depending in part on company and individual performance.
• Company-sponsored 401(k) participation eligibility.
• Pension.
• Vacation benefits.
• Medical, dental, vision, and prescription drug benefits eligibility.
• Flexible benefits, such as healthcare and/or dependent day care flexible spending accounts.
• Life insurance and death benefits.
• Certain time-off and leave-of-absence benefits.
• Well-being benefits, including an employee assistance program, fitness benefits, and employee clubs and activities.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director